Google published a performance analysis study for its TPU (Tensor Processing Unit) chip, which shows that for inference it is 15x to 30x faster than contemporary GPUs and CPUs while being more energy efficient.

Google’s Magenta team released NSynth (Neural Synthesizer), a novel approach to music synthesis to aid the creative process. The release includes a dataset of musical notes and code for an autoencoder model.

RepEval is a new language understanding task to classify textual entailment. It comes with 430k sentence pairs labeled by humans. The competition is open until June 14 and will be featured as a workshop at EMNLP 2017.

Given sufficient amounts of capacity, training data and compute time, byte-level recurrent language models learn meaningful high-level representations, such a single unit which performs sentiment analysis, and reach state of the art on the binary subset of the Stanford Sentiment Treebank.